The accessibility standards are designed to ensure everybody has access to this database. Snippets of information … such as the authors name … can be defined and given a unique identifier … changing the web from collections of linked pages into a massive database. For example, so screen reader software can correctly identify the headings and subheadings and allow visually impaired people can navigate the page. This is not just so pages can be catalogued and displayed correctly, but also to make sure the content can be output in different ways.
The Semantic Web is kind of like this … making sure the parts of the page are tagged so machines can figure out what they are. So the value of consistently naming and applying styles is painfully clear to me. I was using scripts to take the documents and put the data into a database, then outputting a static HTML web site. These documents were being taken into a page layout program and then formatted all over again manally. Every time I thought I'd got them all, I'd find a new variation. Even things like phone numbers were named and formatted in a variety of ways. And a lot of the formatting was inconsistent … font sizes, styles and faces would vary. So it is interesting to get an overview of current HTML best practice.Ī couple of things I thought I knew a lot about … Accessibility and the Semantic Web.Īn early web project I worked on involved a lot of Word documents, which were formatted in weird ways - some document headings would have a heading styles, others would have styles directly applied. I have seen DHTML and XHTML come and go, and competing 'standards' from Netscape and Microsoft battle it out. I have been writing HTML since … well, rather not say. I have been having a go at a course called HTML Essential Training.
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